Dallas Cowboys Blog

Last week, a reporter asked Cowboys owner Jerry Jones if he would entertain the idea of trading Tony Romo for the rights to draft quarterbacks prospects Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III.

“No, I would not,” Jones replied. “Can you imagine trading out of a hell of a player right now so that you can get two to three outstanding draft picks so you can be in this draft?”

It does seem ludicrous, doesn’t it? Although Romo will be 32 this season, he is a proven player who just enjoyed what Cowboys coach Jason Garrett said was the best season of his career in 2011.

But even if Jones seriously considered sacrificing the present welfare of his team for the chance to realize better results with either Griffin or Luck, dealing Romo to another team would be financially infeasible. Based on calculations derived from Romo’s original contract and the one he restructured last year, the salary-cap charge the Cowboys would be assessed in a trade would be roughly $12.56 million — or about $40,000 less than the entire total of estimated cap room that the Cowboys currently have.

That’s because a team that trades a player is responsible for the remaining total of his bonus. So when the Cowboys went ahead last summer and converted $8.19 million of Romo’s 2011 base salary into a prorated bonus that would be paid over five years, they essentially killed any notion that they would trade him before his contract expired in 2013.

For the foreseeable future, the Cowboys are committed to Romo, who posted the fourth-best quarterback rating in the NFL last season.

“We are firmly in the corner that that’s not our issue,” Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones said last week. “If you’re a Cowboy fan, if you’re somebody who wants the Cowboys to do well, that ought to be what you’re happiest about because if we didn’t have a quarterback we would have a real problem. I just believe Tony is as good as anybody.

“I think he plays that position well enough for us to win a Super Bowl, period,” Jones continued. “He’s that good. We’ve got to some things differently in other parts of it and Tony has to do his part, too. He’s got to be a leader and he’s got to pull those guys in. But the way he plays quarterback isn’t our problem.”